I decided to build a bird feeder with a live-streaming camera for my significant other’s birthday. It seems to work pretty well! The system is based on a Raspberry Pi Zero W running the Motion firmware, with an image mask and motion trigger set to activate when birds land on the feeder. Every night, a shell script runs the imagemagick utility to convert all images with the same minute time stamp into fun little combined gifs. This project is a work in progress–automatic image tweeting and imgur uploads should be coming soon! In the meantime, if anyone needs an absolutely massive number of tiny bird gifs, I’m happy to share!
Parts List
- Raspberry Pi Zero W
- Raspberry Pi Camera v2 (don’t forget the adapter cable for the Pi Zero W! :/)
- Window Bird Feeder
- TP-Link Wifi Router with access to a DNS service
